


27 lives

by MarauderCracker



Category: Emerald City (TV 2016), Emerald city - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 03:17:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11797296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/pseuds/MarauderCracker
Summary: He thinks that was his first, that he was born with the sole purpose of loving her.





	27 lives

The first time he remembers Dorothy, her name is Florence and she has the most gorgeous brown eyes in the entire world. He thinks that was his first, that he was born with the sole purpose of loving her. Florence is one of the chosen, her life promised to the witches from the moment she was old enough to accept such fate. He dedicates his life to the Gods, afraid to fall in temptation. 

 

The second time, he doesn’t even remember her until he turns fifteen. He dreams of the dark warmth of her eyes against the blue of her robes and wakes up with the sound of her laughter still ringing in his ears. He looks for her for five years, asks seers and witches, travels the land from East to West and from North to South. But her eyes are nowhere to be seen, and maybe he lost his only chance. When the stars say that the Beast Forever is coming and the witches ask for soldiers to defend the land, he’s the first to step forward. 

(After months and months of war, after hours of being under attack, after an entire lifetime without those eyes, he feels the life leak out of him through a hole in his stomach and drags his body into a trench where he can die. Just before his last breath, he raises his sight and sees him. Covered in blood, carrying another soldier with all of his strength, just in the brink of tears. He has eyes brown like the mud that covers his face, dark and infinitely sad. They’re the last thing he sees.)

 

Third time's too short to even complain about not finding them. The first storm of winter takes a child and his mother, and the people of the village take it as a sign that the spirits are angry. The storm also drags in a family, two women and their daughter that come seeking refuge from the cold and end up staying in the village after the winter passes. The little girl’s eyes are brown and warm, like the fallen leaves that cover the streets of the town.

 

She’s called Alma the next time, and she has the accent of the Kingdom of Ix and eyes that are sometimes brown and and sometimes black. Her skin is darker than he remembers from too much time spent under the sun, but mother says he shouldn’t talk to her. Alma is thinner than a ray of light and all of her bones seem to want to run away from her body. He only sees her that time, that one time when the traveling circus is in town. Alma disappears into a little metal box and the crowd claps, but he feels like his heart disappeared with her. He tries to tell himself that he’s being dumb, that it’s all fantasies of a lovestruck teenager, that the girl from his dreams isn’t real. That Alma’s eyes weren’t more than common eyes, eyes like every other girl’s. He never really convinces himself.

 

There are times when they are best friends. Micah’s eyes are always shining under the hot sun in the No Land, and they run together through thin streets and wide, infinite beaches. Clara’s stare is a shade of brown darker than the most bitter of coffees, and she teaches him sign language during the cold nights in the desert, until the tips of her fingers start sparkling with burning hot magic and they take her away, to live with the witches of the Ripple Land.

 

Martina’s eyes are oil-dark, night-dark, specially when the fog surrounds them as they walk and get drunk together in the streets of the Capital of Ev. Martina is a witch in this life too, but she keeps her magic a secret, and she makes him promise that they will never have a daughter, because she doesn’t want a child of hers to ever live in hiding. Instead of forming a family they travel, sail across the Nonestic Ocean and discover every cave in the Merryland Mountains and never stay in one place long enough for anyone to feel Martina’s magic. It’s a good life, maybe the best they get in centuries.

 

He knows that those eyes are synonym of a lot of things. He looks for them since the beginning, he learns to walk just to be able to run behind every person with eyes like hers. (There’s a life where he can’t see, and he discovers then that he can feel the connection when they touch hands).

 

He looks for her fierce gaze, for the determined stare, for the way those dark irises reflect the sunset and seem for a moment almost blood red. Max has the darkest of hairs and never backs down from a fight (those warm eyes are the eyes of a fighter, but he dies with his eyes closed and his soulmate has to die with him).

 

Paris is the most gorgeous woman in the universe, he’s convinced, and she sings with the sweetest voice from every gramophone (he never gets to talk to her, but she sings in Emerald City often and he goes to see her every time, would recognize those eyes anywhere). They never get to bump into each other in the life next to Paris, though, because Dorothy is called Victory, and she’s one of the brave heroes who give her lives to defeat the Beast Forever when it threatens to swallow Oz.

 

In some lives, Dorothy has already found another person, someone that makes them happy, someone that makes him (him, that’s always chasing those eyes like autumn) useless. Those lives he’s content with sharing a passing smile, a barely there touch on the farmer’s market, a “good morning” each day in the street. But he likes better the lives where they get to wake up together, when the brightness of her smile is what wakes him up every day.

 

There’s a life where Dorothy is called Veronika. She has long, dark hair, and a sword in her right hand. He dies with her stare fixated on him, and thinks that maybe it’s not the worse possible death. He prefers it a million times to living a life without finding that gaze that turns his bones into thin air.

 

Every life he’s afraid this will be the last life, this one. He’s afraid he will never see eyes so deep, so dark, so warm. There are lives where he tries to love people that are not meant for him; lives where he can’t find Dorothy and settles for a pair of eyes that don’t make him feel as if he’s seeing the whole of the universe. There are lives where he remembers too late, some where he feels as if he’s always known. There are lives where he almost forgets about her, where he convinces himself that it’s all a fantasy again. And this time he succeeds, he lets life push and pull and deliver him to Glinda’s door. He loves Glinda, loves her enough to kill for her. Maybe even enough to die for her.

 

He wakes up to pain, a lot of pain and a lot of nothingness. He can barely see, breathing hurts like hell, and he can hardly tell if the moving figure he thinks he sees is real. He snaps in and out of consciousness, always in pain but not always awake. He comes back to himself when something presses against the wound on his abdomen, wakes to a stabbing pain and a soft voice saying “you have a deep wound here”.

“What happened to you?” the voice asks, and he can make a face, a smudge of blood on the forehead, deep dark eyes. He searches for an answer but can’t find any. There is pain, and then there is nothing. 

“I don’t know, I don’t remember,” he replies, choking on the words. His throat is dry, he doesn’t know how long he’d been hanging from the cross. He knows that he was crucified but he doesn’t know  _ why  _ he knows the word crucified, and he doesn’t seem to have any other concise memory either. Only a vague feeling of longing, of waiting.

She asks his name and he can’t tell this either, shakes his head almost like spasm. She goes to touch him and he recoils. She lowers her hands but remains calm, doesn’t back down and holds his gaze. Her eyes are dark, brown. He feels recognition settling like something warm inside his chest.


End file.
